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Pokémon GO Fan App Attracted Almost 300 Thousand Trolls in 3 Days

I write this
post humbled. In some ways, I have learned more about human nature in
the past two days, at least insofar as it relates to smartphone users
and Pokémon, as I have in my time as an entrepreneur studying and
working in the field.

The
learning curve has been pretty steep, but the lessons valuable and, I
believe, can be used by entrepreneurs and marketers who want to take
advantage of unconventional PR opportunities in the future. It’s also
pretty hilarious.

Rise of the Follow-On App

Apple’s
fast new approval process is letting developers and marketers take
advantage of flash trends that have a major impact on App Store search
results like Pokémon GO. Approvals, which used to take around a week,
are now often happening in less than 24 hours, meaning you can find
complimentary use cases and put a rough product out there before the
trend dies down — in fact, staged launches in other regions can prolong
the “release effects” of huge titles for weeks.

Of
course, we weren’t the only ones to realize this and take a ride on
Hurricane Niantic. GoChat, the first local messenger service to pop up
for Pokémon GO — released by a savvy beta tester a day before the headliner itself — reportedly saw over one million downloads before the young developer was undone either by his servers or his bank account and removed the app.

This
was the first in a number (I’m guessing hundreds?) of applications
hitting the app store to fill real or perceived gaps in the GO
experience. Following GoChat, other in-app messengers were quick to jump
on the distinctly lacking social functions of Pokémon GO and provide a
way for “trainers” to communicate with other nearby users on the hunt.

On
top of this, I can count at least 50 guides (perhaps the easiest thing
to build) in the US App Store alone that have popped up in response to
the light instruction given in the app, or just pure opportunism, or
both — I can’t argue with $3.99/install margin over the cost of a Google
search (very curious to see how many people opened their wallets for
those).

Perhaps the
most important and … illuminating … race in this game, however, has been
for a location map marking pokémon in a given area. Like the two cases
above, it’s based on a perhaps intentional
limitation in the Pokémon GO UI, which only gives users visibility in
the AR space near their current real world locations and an indecipherable ‘nearby’ feature. Given the intrinsic desire to “catch ’em all”, users were obviously eager to know the location of rare finds in the area …

Crowd
sourced Google Maps started popping up first on web and were followed
soon after with new approvals into the app store. These were based on a
pretty simple principle: open the map up to the crowd and let all the
good citizens populate it with their finds. Needless to say, the crowd
certainly got involved, but being both unaccountable and of course eager
to prove that we can’t have nice things they decided to fill the maps
with false sightings and trash (which were subsequently rated into
oblivion).

We Get Involved

Given
the once-in-a-lifetime PR opportunity we saw (as well as our, um,
abnormally high interest in Pokémon relative to our peers), our team at
Unboxd decided to take advantage of tremendous consumer and media
response with an app of our own.

On top of
this, we were fairly confident we would succeed (although the meaning of
success here had yet to be defined). Given our existing proprietary
codebase from Unboxd and our CTO’s
expertise in handling massive scale, we felt we were in a unique
position to create a 3rd party app that stood out from the fray — and
wouldn’t be crushed under the force of the Niantic wave.

In
a single day, code was repurposed and elaborated on to create an
interactive map in where users could upload screenshots of the pokémon
they were finding, tag the pocket monster in question, and leave a nice
comment. Others would be able to search the map and like the best shots.
GoSnaps — Share Screenshots of Pokémon GO
went live in the Apple App Store on July 14th in the early afternoon. I
will explain the events that followed in terms of assumptions made and
summarily disproven (with prejudice).

Assumption 1: We would have to tell people about it

Without
a single post on Reddit or Facebook, at first hundreds, then thousands,
then tens of thousands of people had downloaded the app. This was
driven almost entirely by searches for Pokémon GO.

Assumption 2: Given the stated intention of the app, people would upload Pokémon GO screenshots

We
are not (totally) naive, but nevertheless we thought a significant
percentage of users would be uploading app screenshots or at least
Pokémon-related content. We were wrong. At this stage there are 100s of
thousands of uploads. Of these, only .5% are real screenshots. If you’d like to see select examples of the more appropriate uploads, check out GoSnaps on Instagram @gosnapsapp and Twitter @gosnapsofficial. For the inappropriate content, please message us directly ;)

Assumption 3: We could manage the incoming content

Likely
victims of our own simple UI and the fact that we haven’t required any
signup, we were almost immediately buried by user uploads of every kind.
The initial reporting system that was implemented, essentially
navigating from upload to upload and flagging content, was nowhere near
enough to deal with the tons of incoming submissions (many of which
paired tags of rare pokémon with, say, the flag of ISIS). Quickly an
admin page was put up and AI implemented to sort the wheat from the
chaff. Did I mention the chaff already includes over 300 thousand
shitposts?

Takeaways So Far

Here’s a few of the lessons I’ve learned and some tactics you can use if you’d like to try a similar PR stunt yourself.

ISIS
are as good or better at marketing than the media has suggested. Expect
to see inappropriate content early in the release cycle — even before
your app takes off. Work on your reporting system while your app is
awaiting approval.

Prepare
for scale from the beginning. Many users being exposed to your app are
not early adopters and are unlikely to tolerate failure without leaving a
nasty rating. We are lucky to have a real expert here and still have
experienced some delays and difficulties with the load.

Keep the interface super
simple. Common sense dictates that the less friction there is in using
an app, the more chances you’ll have for early engagement. This applies
double for apps riding a significant trend.

The
primary driver of traffic in these situations is search and, as such,
App Store Optimization should be your first priority. Name the trending
subject in your app title. Don’t skip making a few professional-looking
assets and screenshots before you go live — when the follow-on
competition crowds the results you’ll stick out.

Finally,
people love selfies. Moreover, girls taking selfies all over the world
think the Snapchat dog filter is cute and worthy of sharing both on and
off of Snapchat. I’m not sure how to use this knowledge, but it is
apparently an international and universal truth.

What’s Next

GoSnaps’
explosive growth isn’t over yet — we’re still adding somewhere in the
range of 100 thousand users every day. More importantly, a steadily
increasing number are coming back for more and we plan to make the
experience even better for them.

Look
out for the next version of the app which will bring list views, better
sorting, a clear walkthrough, and a variety of sorting options to our
interactive map.

Niantic,
if you’re reading this, please direct all future acquisition offers to
our head of IR … and no more low-balling it, y’hear!

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